thu 28/03/2024

Wolfmother, Forum | reviews, news & interviews

Wolfmother, Forum

Wolfmother, Forum

North London nods and moshes to the hairy Australian hard-rockers

Wolfmother: Riffery, proggery and big hair

Did Wolfmother spring from outer space, or drift down to Earth from the tail of a comet? Did they slip into our age from another dimension, burrowing through a wormhole in the space-time continuum to land in Sydney, Australia in the 21st century? Where did they come from? Never, except for tribute bands, have I witnessed a group performing in one era whose music owes so much to another. These hairy Australian rockers are steeped in the lore of late-Sixties psychedelia and early-Seventies hard rock, their singer Andrew Stockdale shrieks like Ozzy Osbourne, Ian Gillan and the rest of the rock-wailers, and their songs are masterpieces of riffery, with all manner of proggy noodling and tricky time signatures and changes of pace.

Did Wolfmother spring from outer space, or drift down to Earth from the tail of a comet? Did they slip into our age from another dimension, burrowing through a wormhole in the space-time continuum to land in Sydney, Australia in the 21st century? Where did they come from? Never, except for tribute bands, have I witnessed a group performing in one era whose music owes so much to another. These hairy Australian rockers are steeped in the lore of late-Sixties psychedelia and early-Seventies hard rock, their singer Andrew Stockdale shrieks like Ozzy Osbourne, Ian Gillan and the rest of the rock-wailers, and their songs are masterpieces of riffery, with all manner of proggy noodling and tricky time signatures and changes of pace.

The title track of Wolfmother's 2009 album Cosmic Egg was an epic of twiddling and diddling

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